Seagate Backup Plus Portable 4TB USB 3.0 Drive Review
by Ganesh T S on August 4, 2015 8:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
In the introductory section, we had mentioned about some value-adding features of the Backup Plus Portable drive. In order to take advantage of these features, the Seagate Dashboard app needs to be installed first. The app allows configuration of the backup sources, restoration of backups, connection to cloud services such as Dropbox / Google Drive / Nero Drive and associating the drive with those services (if applicable). The general interface and available options in the Seagate Dashboard can be seen in the video below.
The Dashboard also allows upload and download of photos / videos associated with a Facebook or Flickr account. In terms of other features, the free 200GB on OneDrive is available only after the product is registered (launching the registration through the setup program in the drive automatically populates the necessary serial number field). Lyve is yet another standalone application that can be used to back up photos and videos to the drive as well as the cloud. The download link is again provided on the page launched by the setup program in the drive. Seagate also provides Paragon drivers for Windows and Mac OS - allowing the former to read and write HFS+ drives and the latter to read and write NTFS drives.
Coming to the business end of the review, we need to discuss the pricing. The 4TB Backup Plus Portable was launched with a MSRP of $240, but the street price for the STDR4000100 seems to be closer to $200. The performance of the disk is what one would expect from a traditional PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) drive. Our DAS suite benchmark doesn't reveal any SMR (shingled magnetic recording) firmware tricks. (Update - 10/21/2016: The drive uses platters that operate partly in PMR mode and partly in SMR, along with multi-tier caching (MTC) which includes DRAM and flash - The efficiency of MTC ensures that an empty drive maintains as much consistency as a PMR drive even under heavy traffic.) Pretty much the only improvement idea that we can think of is a larger internal buffer. On the whole, at $0.05 / GB, it is one of the most cost-effective and easily portable storage media currently available for purchase. The value-added features such as the free OneDrive storage and the functional Seagate Dashboard app serve to sweeten the deal.
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bolyki - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Is it only me, who cannot see why manufacturers use SATA3 while the drive is A, 5200RPM B, it's only a HDD, not SSD, so SATA2 would be more than enoughGigaplex - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's a marketing tick box.mathew7 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Because the HDD also has a microcontroller which is an updated design with sata3. I doubt the chip itself is designed inhouse (by Seagate in this case). The industry wants to reuse whatever they can (avoid reinventing the wheel). That's why (if I remember) Samsung SSDs use 3-core ARM chips as controllers. They focus on the SW (firmware to us) and avoid chip design costs.nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
1. Sometimes even these old, slow spinners get lucky with a cached file or something, and that extra overhead can satisfy a short burst of throughput that would otherwise be lost.http://techreport.com/review/22794/western-digital...
2. There are more benefits to using the newer controller than just throughput.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
3. It's possible that the SATA3 controllers are cheaper per/100,000 units or something that just makes business sense.
DanNeely - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's not just about burst performance when they have a cache hit; newer versions of the protocol also come with command set enhancements that can provide and occasional boost in performance.joex4444 - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
It's likely to do with part 3, but from the manufacturing side. It's cheaper to run production of one type of thing than two types of things. Further, if it's cheaper to produce just SATA3 instead of both SATA2 and SATA3 then it makes the availability of SATA2 go away, so while we may suppose SATA3 is overkill or more expensive it may be that in practice you simply can't buy a SATA2 controller. While SATA2 *should* be cheaper, that presupposes it's a viable option.Samus - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
Personally I don't trust a 7200RPM drive "locked in a cage."5400RPM drives are much less prone to thermal runaway when being hammered with a few TB of data over a short period, say, during an initial backup. To combat this, manufactures have introduced very aggressive head parking, which causes wear in other areas of the drive. This data cane be seen on the first page under load/unload count 0000000D (which is 13) for a drive that has only been powered on 5 times and has less than an hour of use. Many of these 2.5" drives are rated at low as 100,000 load/unload cycles but some are rated as high as 1,000,000.
So even though the 5400RPM drive will inevitably last longer due to better thermal performance and less inertia when "banged around" eventually the loading ramp will fail and cause physical wear to the heads or the platter edge.
I recommend always passing an APM 255 command to drives that run 24/7 and an APM 250 command to drives that run more than an hour a day. Read http://xenomorph.net/misc/clicking-hard-drives/
If all you use this drive for is occasional backup AND you unplug it after each use (which is what Seagate marketting suggests) then ALL of this is irrelevant because the drive wont get enough use to park itself to death.
stephenbrooks - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
I have a 2-drive DAS on my desk (with moderate-to-heavy usage) that gets worryingly hot to touch even though it incorporates a small fan. I'd like to see these enclosures come with breathing holes, even though that would probably reduce waterproofness and so on.boe - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
Personally if I'm trying to back up 4TB I don't trust a 5400RPM drive. Unless I only need to back up once a week - 5400 is WAY too slow. I use toaster bays and drop in a raw 7200 FAST hard drive and I can complete a full backup every night.sarinsoman - Sunday, May 29, 2016 - link
I am looking for a similar capacity portable USB hard drive. My primary usage will be storing my raw photographs from my SLR camera. I want a reliable and same time fast drive as you can imagine every time i will be copying almost 64GBs of data from my camera. My budget is USD 170 to 200. Can you recommend me a good one.